Covering CCP's Fanfest event is always a uniquely interesting part of the games calendar. With the publisher adopting a more workmanlike commitment to Eve Online's future - rather than the wide-eyed ambitions of old - its annual jamboree in Reykjavik never felt more like videogaming's TED conference than it did this weekend.

“We came up with a crazy idea. Why don't we take these scientific research problems, transform them, and then inject them into major computer games as seamless gaming experiences that are completely integrated into game mechanics?”

Attila Szantner was inspired by citizen science projects like Zooniverse to create a platform called Massively Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS), a new way to provide amateur science enthusiasts with the means to analyse real-world data, and make meaningful contributions to the progress of scientific discovery. Despite the continued accelerating growth of computing power, citizen science solves a crucial problem for research: humans possess the gift of abstract insight, silicon does not.

The beta release of Elite Dangerous 1.1 is now available to download, giving pilots a taste of what's coming up in the space game's first major content patch.

Top of the feature list is a new form of content developer Frontier calls Community Goals. These new player-driven goals exist to bring pilots together in pursuit of a common achievement: killing a certain number of enemy pilots in a particular system, for example, or providing a certain quantity of goods to a particular region. The success or failure of these multiplayer missions will have a tangible effect on the political stability of the region.

When the new patch goes live, pilots will be able to work together to build capital ships and starports to assist the exploration of deep space. All players will be able to contribute to these greater galactic causes, whether they choose to play in the game's Solo or Open modes.

"This gives us just enough time to polish what we have and put out something we'll be proud of and hopefully you'll be excited to play," Sony Online Entertainment boss John Smedley wrote in a post on Reddit.

The Early Access version of H1Z1 includes initial iterations of crafting, base building, combat, vehicles, circle-of-death, the day / night cycle, weather, player vitals, hunting and forging and, as you'd expect, zombies.

World of Warcraft turned ten on Sunday, and all throughout this week we'll be marking the anniversary with a series of features from across Eurogamer's editorial team. Having taken you through the game's finest dungeon, today John tells the tale of how he bagged WOW's most elusive achievement.

In a world packed with linear storylines, daily quests and gated dungeons, fishing has always been one of WOW's purest role-playing pursuits. Grab a metaphorical chair, listen to the siren song of the game's ethereal soundtrack, and embrace the gentle simplicity of a two button, click-to-cast minigame nestled within one of gaming's most marvellous worlds. When everything was new, and before all was efficiency and magic became mundane, this element of WOW was every bit as beguiling to me as even the grandest design strokes.

Although the profession became more tangibly useful in subsequent expansions, fishing remained something gloriously useless - almost defiantly so, given the increasing richness of more carefully crafted content sprinkled lavishly throughout Azeroth. From my first days exploring the Night Elf starting island, to my very last when fatigue set in and I just stopped logging in one day, it remained one of my favourite activities in the game.

World of Warcraft turned ten on Sunday, and all throughout this week we'll be marking the anniversary with a series of features from across Eurogamer's editorial team. Today, John reminisces on the game's early raiding scene, and pays tribute to one of Blizzard's greatest dungeons.

There were two paths ahead of you if you wanted to sample WOW's end-game raiding scene prior to the release of the game's first expansion. First, there were the cavernous zones such as Molten Core, designed for guilds large enough to field 40 players against the game's most monstrous creations. More accessible on paper - yet arguably less forgiving in practice - were the 20-player affairs like Zul'Gurub, the dense tropical jungle filled with poison and panic.

The Burning Crusade expansion shook things up by introducing an upper limit of 25 players for all raiding content. This transition towards tighter and more focused group combat was a double-edged sword, however. Raiding certainly became more accessible for players like me who existed outside of the largest guilds, but established raiding communities suffered a blunt mathematical division within their ranks.

World of Warcraft's executive producer J. Allen Brack has apologised on the official forums for the launch issues that have blighted the game since the release of the Warlords of Draenor expansion last week. Subscribers will also be offered five free days of playtime as compensation.

Many players have experienced excessive queues when attempting to log in to the game, and the expansion's new Garrison feature has left many players unable to progress through the storyline, or make progress within the player-housing feature.

"I know how much everyone was looking forward to this expansion, and once you were able to get in and start having fun, all the comments I've seen indicate that this is one of our best yet. But the quality of the content does not excuse the subpar launch experience we delivered, and I apologize for that," the statement begins.

The third beta phase for Elite Dangerous is live now, and introduces two new ships, a larger area of the galaxy to mess around in, a host of visual and interface improvements, and new content for project backers to test before the game's anticipated release before the end of this year.

New gameplay content arrives in the form of enhanced interdiction mechanics - allowing players to interrupt the passage of others through local space - a new philanthropy missions system, asteroid mining, and the ability to scoop fuel out of nearby stars if you've rather awkwardly found yourself stranded in Alpha Centauri.

The game area itself has also been increased from the 500 systems available in the previous beta round, to nearly 2500 as of this morning. A galaxy comprised of 400 billion star systems is planned for launch, so there's still a little way to go before the ultimate scope of the game is realised.

With Blizzard halting work on Titan and CCP putting a stake through eight years of World of Darkness development, the number of blockbuster MMORPGs visible on the horizon has slumped to an all-time low. Even the likes of just-released Destiny, which shares as much DNA with World of Warcraft as it does Halo, has been eager to avoid the toxicity of being associated with gaming's unwieldiest acronym. For a breed of multiplayer game that broke so explosively across our CRTs back in 1997 and seemed so utterly dominant just a few years ago, this feels like the end times.

How we got to this ignominious level cap for the genre-without-end is a discussion for another time, but if a lingering MMORPG apocalypse is indeed upon us, WildStar is well placed to offer a rousing send off. In direct contrast to Elder Scrolls Online's rather earnest and dour fugue, Carbine's WOW-baiting debut offers up an anthology of greatest hit MMO features, with just enough new material of its own to suggest that perhaps the persistent world party may have some life left in it after all.

The focus of WildStar's storyline is the planet Nexus, recently discovered by the game's good guys, the Exiles, who, as their name suggests, are in need of a new home. Meanwhile the big bad Dominion would rather have Nexus and its resources for themselves. Thus the game opens as the persistent battle between the two sides rages on, with the player, after having chosen their allegiance, taking on the role of saviour and/or vanquisher. It's the usual stuff, basically, where you have to pretend everyone else is playing a different scenario to you, which of course they're not.

Corporate metal band Metallica will close the show at this year's BlizzCon, the annual celebration of all things Blizzard taking place at the Anaheim Convention Center in California next month.

"We're thrilled to have Metallica blowing out our speakers at BlizzCon this year," said Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime. "After two full days of epic gaming and intense eSports action, an earth-shaking concert is the perfect sendoff for everyone at the show and watching from home."

As well as showcasing panels and events for the company's roster of games, Blizzard's annual jamboree has also been traditionally used as a vehicle to announce new games and expansions. Will we hear anything concrete on the recently teased Overwatch project?

Before every new WOW expansion there's a patch which lays the foundation for the next round of adventuring in Azeorth and beyond. This week's release of Patch 6.0.2 introduces extensive changes to the game's combat stats, plenty of interface tweaks across the board, and a new dungeon and quest-line to help players get accustomed to the Warlords of Draenor expansion before it arrives next month. Here's what jumped out at us as while we were poking around in the new content.

WOW's questing has come on leaps and bounds since 2004, but there's still an overwhelming dependence on point-to-point adventuring. While it serves a certain purpose nevertheless, there's nothing about the brief quest-line which introduces the next chapter of the game's grand story that suggests things will be radically different in Warlords of Draenor. The Iron Horde are storming through the Blasted Lands' Dark Portal to make their first tentative claims on Azeroth, and you're part of the vanguard monitoring the enemy's arrival.

The way the story unfolds from here is very firmly rooted in the core questing structure that was established in Mists of Pandaria - embark on a few exploratory sorties to pick off a specific type of target, interact with an object in some way, then do away with a trio of factional figureheads. It's very familiar ground, in other words, and if Warlords of Draenor evolves the questing concept further then it seems like a missed opportunity not to showcase it here.

Patch 6.0.2 has just been released for World of Warcraft, paving the way for the introduction of the Warlords of Draenor expansion that's due in a little under a month from now. The new patch not only makes some fairly drastic changes to WOW's stats, characters and skillsets, there's also a new quest line and dungeon to keep you busy for the next few weeks.

Here's a quick look at all of the new quest and dungeon content in the new patch, and what you need to know to work your way through it.

There's nothing particularly revolutionary about the new quest-line that's popped up in the Blasted Lands - kill a certain kind of enemy, then kill three tougher-than-usual creatures, then go back and pick up your rewards. When you first log into the game after applying the patch, you'll be given the starting quest that takes you over to the Dark Portal region.

WOW still started the year stronger, with 7.6m subscribers at the end of March, but with expansion Warlords of Draenor just around the corner - out 13th November - a significant spike this way comes.

The bump in subscribers arrived earlier than analysts expected, and was attributed by Activision-Blizzard to expansion and pre-expansion-patch excitement. WOW patch 6.0.2 - which brings updated character models (GameSpot recorded a nice video comparison), tweaks to the UI and player classes, and adds the Iron Horde Incursion preparatory world event - has only just been released.

The pre-release patch for Warlords of Draenor, the fifth World of Warcraft expansion, launches in the US tomorrow, with the EU version arriving on Wednesday.

The hefty update, which lays the groundwork for the next few years of adventuring in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game, packs in plenty of changes as WOW approaches its second decade of service. (The last time we checked our background downloader there was still another 8GB of data left to go, so if you've switched off automatic downloading in the past, you might want to think about re-enabling it ahead of launch.)

This time around, the traditional pre-expansion world event sees the legions of the Iron Horde invading Azeroth through the Dark Portal, and you'll be able to pop along when the patch goes live and bop a few of them on the chin.

There are soon to be unexpected and high profile exits at Eve Online maker CCP.

In a financial report (highlighted by Reddit) the company announced plans to close its San Francisco office and, in the same stroke, wave goodbye to chirpy chief marketing officer David Reid and chief financial officer Joe Gallo.

It's part of a plan to "combine and simplify" the business, CCP leader Hilmar Veigar Pétursson briefly explained. "Joe Gallo and David Reid did great work for CCP and I wish them well," he added in a statement translated in email by CCP. "Their contributions to CCP will be remembered, and we look forward to seeing what they do next."

It's not explicitly clear where the figure comes from but SuperData's MMO earnings data is compiled from "the monthly spending of 36.9 million digital gamers, worldwide, collected from developers, publisher and payment service providers". Presumably the ESO figure comes from the same place.

Game-publisher Bethesda hasn't released sales or subscription data for The Elder Scrolls Online, and as its parent company ZeniMax Media is privately held, doesn't really have to.

I'm always late to the party - even when most of the people at the party are dead. In the case of DayZ, I'm very late indeed. It's been two years since Dean Hall's mod started to turn ordinary gamers into hardened survivalists, and in that time, it feels like the game has helped cement a genre - or something that certainly behaves like one. I get hundreds of press releases in my inbox every week, and about two thirds of them promise that the latest title I'm about to fall in love with is just like DayZ - or just like Minecraft. These titles are not unrelated. In 2014, we love foraging and scavenging. We love finding our own tools and getting by on next to nothing. We love hardship. We love suffering. It's no longer enough to just thrive - we want to feel the sharp edge of survival itself.

Why is this?

That's a question that's worth trying to answer, if only because these games feel so vital, and it would be nice to get some of that vitality into the rest of gaming, too. When I first dropped onto a DayZ server, for example, I just waited. I knew something awful was going to happen to me. I wanted something awful to happen to me. I wanted DayZ to kick me around, like it had kicked around all my friends. Sure enough, I didn't have to wait long.

A recent survey of 10 million mobile gamers claimed only 2.2 per cent of the free-to-play audience spent any money at all. That's worrying - does it mean developers are deliberately designing games to cater for the minuscule minority rather than the vast majority?

"That is a flawed and misleading assumption rooted in pre-digital thinking," answered Nicholas Lovell, owner of Gamesbrief, a F2P-focused games business site. "It is based on the thinking that a person who does not pay is barely better than a pirate, an evil freeloader, who must be made to pay or else.

"F2P design assumes that the majority of people will never pay and that's OK. They will be happy to wait rather than accelerate. They will choose not to spend money on wearables or status items. They will play the core experience, not every last facet of the game.

The developer of MMORPG Wurm Online is offering a 10,000 euro (approximately £8200) reward for information about a recent DDOS attack.

Yesterday, shortly after the release of the hotly anticipated update 1.2, Wurm Online was forced offline after it was targeted by a DDOS. In a post on the game's website, Swedish developer Code Club said: "We can offer 10 000 Euro for any tips or evidence leading to a conviction of the person responsible for this attack."

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1656236Wed, 19 Feb 2014 11:10:00 +0000Now Lightning is in Final Fantasy 14Not content with three Final Fantasy games of her own, Lightning is set to invade another game in Square Enix's series.

The Final Fantasy 13, 13-2 and Lightning Returns star will pop along to say hi to the residents of massively multiplayer online game Final Fantasy 14 in a Full Active Time Event.

What this means is players will get the chance to fight alongside Lightning. Complete the event and you'll get armour and weapons modeled after Lightning Returns. Siliconera notes female characters get a Lightning costume, and male characters get a Snow costume. See it in action in the video below.

Dungeons and raids are usually the most exciting part of any MMO, but there's still depressingly little heroism to be had in most of them. To be fair, there's a tiny sliver of time when this isn't the case - when a new dungeon arrives in, say, World of Warcraft, and teams have to go face its bosses and other challenges without a convenient wiki on hand. Those early days can be amazing.

Almost immediately though, heroism goes from defying the odds to merely consulting them; of not simply going in to pit a party's skill against the latest threat to their world, but having the Dummies Guide To Killing This Guy under one arm. Worse, the expectation of this knowledge brings out the worst in the average MMO player, who has usually seen everything a hundred times and just wants to get to the end to get their shiny whatever.

Not only does this breed hostility towards new players, thanks to far too many old hands forgetting the time they served at the business end of the learning curve, it produces a vicious cycle where design increasingly has to be built around efficiency rather than actual adventure. The descent can be seen best in WOW, which started with dungeons of a comparable size and scope to a standard RPG, but inevitably got whittled down to little but a few boxes for bosses and corridors full of trash mobs. If anything, it's a wonder players still tolerate those.

It's impossible to resist introducing you to the official unveiling of a post-World of Warcraft MMO without referencing the Las Vegas environment SOE has chosen for showcasing EverQuest Next. Broken dreams, disappointments, big stakes and heavy losses abound in both of these entertainment industries, after all. Admittedly there are fewer prostitutes, binge-drinking chugalugs and Dolly Parton-themed slot machines in your average fantasy MMO, but it's certainly a metaphor with legs.

SOE is at least going all in with this new EverQuest adventure, and it's a game that largely abandons a template still capable of drawing a convention's worth of fans together. It's a bold vision of what the company thinks a next-generation MMO should look like, and it begins with the world itself. Constructed using voxel technology - and layered on top of a heavily modified version of the engine powering PlanetSide 2 - the destruction and manipulation of your next home from home lies at the heart of almost every design decision.

At the personal level of combat, spellcasts and melee manoeuvres - dished out so repetitively as part of the MMO combat canon - have a tangible effect on this particular world. In a demo set in a dark forest ruins, blade flurries tear apart the crumbling walls, while spells shatter the floor and send enemies tumbling into the depths below. It's in those depths that you'll find another of EverQuest Next's bolder design approaches - underground levels layered one beneath the other, where procedurally generated ruins, questing opportunities and riches lie waiting to be explored and recovered.

While gingerly picking my way through the alchemical laboratory at the centre of a ransacked mansion, carefully hunting for clues, I found myself facing a large, glowing stone the size of man. I stepped closer, carefully examined the surface of this gigantic oddity and read the description that this quest's creator had left for me.

"It's just a typical magical crystal," it said.

Ah, it's just a typical magical crystal. Move along. And so I did, because the rest of the quest was to be found elsewhere, in overturning other, very clearly signposted clues and shanking a few more elves.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1598057Fri, 12 Jul 2013 16:00:00 +0100Jagex hopes to have RuneScape on tablets by the end of the year

Incredibly popular, incredibly big, 12-year-old browser MMO RuneScape could be released on tablets before the end of the year.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1578693Thu, 09 May 2013 13:42:00 +0100Eve Online: Into the second decade

Ten years after its launch, Eve Online is in a strange place. It's a game with just 500,000 players, nothing by most MMO standards, yet one whose stories, heists and controversies regularly spark interest in a wider audience that would never actually dream of playing it. On Twitter, I asked my followers what would make them give it a shot at this point. "Nothing," was the standard answer. "A complete reset," answered a couple more. Perhaps most notably, "Any change that would make me want to play would stop it from being Eve."

This is not of course lost on CCP. "For a long time we've been thinking how to engage the large group of people who are fascinated by this universe, the promise of what Eve can be, but this particular game is too hard, too cut-throat, too complicated, too hardcore," former senior producer Jon Lander told me. Later, chief marketing officer David Reid was happy to admit "Eve is a hard game, and we're okay with that. Some of those people will never be Eve players, and probably never should. But it shouldn't necessarily be as hard to understand it. The gamers who made this company over the first decade are going to look a little different in the second, coming from free-to-play, mobile and tablet. A big part of our job is bringing them into the universe."

The key words there are 'particular game' and 'universe', especially at this year's Eve FanFest, where shooter Dust 514 and CCP's line "Eve Is Real" together got at least as much attention as the spaceships. I'll admit to having been a bit skeptical of Dust actually playing a big role in the main universe, but this year's announcements made it clear that it's far from just a throw-away game. Whether they work out or not in the long-term, and 'long-term' is the timeline, CCP has huge plans in mind for it. First we have the Uprising (free) expansion where Dust players can break away from the server-browser high-security planets to start actually conquering worlds.

To understand Eve Online, you need to visit Reykjavik. It won't help with mundane details like which battlecruiser to aspire to, but the ride from Keflavik airport to both CCP and FanFest's home town is an eye-opening experience. Simply knowing that Iceland has a hostile interior is nothing compared to actually seeing it - not merely how small its patches of civilisation are amongst seemingly infinite emptiness with no trees and often nothing to see but the remnants of volcanic activity covered in moss, but the kind of community it takes to handle it.

Even with a Subway seemingly on every corner, this remains a tough land for tough people, clustered together and very aware of the need for co-operation. We're talking a culture so interconnected that there's a genuine not-a-joke smartphone app to help Icelanders make sure they don't accidentally get jiggy with too close a relative. Just driving through is to realise that Iceland may not be the only place Eve Online could have been made, but it's as much a part of its soul as the spaceships, with Reykjavik its own high-sec region. They even share a currency, making for at least one bizarre moment when we're told the event has raised two million ISK for charity. Actual money, or spacebucks? Do charities need battlecruisers?

FanFest's location, the Harpa, is a giant concert hall built of slanted, multicoloured crystal that I wouldn't be shocked to one day hear had taken off to finally rejoin the mothership. Inside is equally cool, a convention location that M.C. Escher might have designed, with staircases spiking up and down and drawing the eye into unusual places. Adding to the endearing chaos, CCP has renamed all of the rooms with Eve names like "Tranquility" and "Multiplicity", but the signs everywhere still point to the likes of "Eldborg" and "Silfurberg" and "Toilets", and all of them seem to have at least one entrance somewhere just to confuse.

What do you get if you combine Eve Online with the Oculus Rift? A loud enough whoop to knock the roof off this year's FanFest in Reykjavik, followed by the kind of queues God himself has never seen to have a go. I'm actually writing this in advance of the announcement, but I'm quietly confident. One of the most beautiful space games ever. Virtual reality. 1500 people who travelled to Iceland to celebrate Eve Online. There will be whooping.

Luckily, I had a chance to play it earlier on, and can confirm that it's worth it. Should the opportunity to play it present itself, snap it up. If you're at FanFest and thinking you'll skip the queue for some reason, go stand in it right now. Really. Impossibly long or not, you will bitterly regret if it you don't, possibly to the extent of enlisting the girl at the tattoo booth downstairs to ink on a permanent mark of shame. But why make two mistakes at one event?

To be clear though, this isn't actually Eve Online VR, but a Unity powered, 3x3 dogfighting game using some of its assets and put together by CCP employees as a side-project. It's called EVR. It's not a finished game. The official CCP line is that no decisions have been made about its future - whether it gets the resources to become an actual Oculus Rift game/Eve spin-off, is just brought out this time next year as a FanFest tradition, or is never played again.
A game only lasts three minutes, most of it spent staring and going "Oooh..." and trying not to make any unfortunate faces for unseen people to cruelly shoot with their camera-phones. This was my first time with an Oculus Rift, and while the experience was naturally a bit blurry and unkind to my glasses-wearing, astigmatic eyes, it was still hugely impressive.

UPDATE: That didn't take long! ZeniMax Media has had the video removed from Vimeo.

ORIGINAL STORY: A 20 minute video of unedited The Elder Scrolls Online beta gameplay has found its way online.

The video emerged this weekend (via PCGamesN), where it popped up on YouTube and DailyMotion before it was removed following copyright claims by Zenimax Media - the parent company of TESO developer ZeniMax Online Studios.

The words 'theme park MMO' get thrown around a lot these days, but rarely have they felt more apt than during my four hours with The Elder Scrolls Online. If Skyrim, Cyrodiil and so on are worlds, TESO smacks of the World Showcase from Disney's Epcot - familiar sights remade in fibreglass to be admired but never seriously mistaken for the original. Not as many gift shops. Far more spiders. This time, the park owners will actively block your path until you agree to sit through the local equivalent of "O Canada". Still, the comparison fits.

I'd love to be wrong about this, and a few hours clearly isn't anything like enough time to get the measure of a whole MMORPG. It, however, is plenty of time to be disappointed by its direction. It's not that TESO isn't polished, professional or well crafted - in most of the details, it's as strong and accomplished and well-crafted as anything else out there. From the sections I got to play and the higher-end content demoed though, it feels like an MMO given an Elder Scrolls makeover, not The Elder Scrolls reinvented as an MMO.

Expecting Skyrim-style world simulation, freedom, depth and player agency is unrealistic in a game that has to handle thousands of players messing around, and unless things change radically as the story progresses, TESO doesn't try for that. Its world has an empty vibe to it, with very little interaction density and quest-givers just sitting around holding out for a hero. For the Daggerfall Covenant faction's starting area, the island of Stros M'Kai, that means helping a group of pirates rescue kidnapped colleagues and stealing goodies that inevitably don't mean much booty despite you doing all the hard work.

Dropping the default Secret World subscription in December but not the cost of the game helped, a lot. The MMO sold more than 70,000 copies in the last four weeks.

Funcom said that represented a 30 per cent increase in the MMO's total sales. Popping that into my fixed (with your help) calculator, that puts The Secret World's grand total at just over 300,000 sales.

Gameforge, which manages Tera in Europe, announced that those who have already played and paid will be granted Veteran status following the switch. Unlike free players, Veterans will have all eight character slots instead of two, four bank tabs instead of one and a special title available in-game.

There's also the Tera Club, which you'll automatically join if you still have an active subscription by February. This status provides you with bonuses and boosts during your remaining subscription time after Tera goes free-to-play. After it expires you'll switch to Veteran status.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1533429Wed, 05 Dec 2012 10:03:00 +0000The final hours of City of Heroes

On the last night of the world, things are surprisingly quiet. There's the occasional alien invasion, just for old time's sake. In hidden laboratories, mad scientists who haven't heard the news that City of Heroes is to be shut down at midnight continue their plans to conquer a doomed world. Civilians find themselves alone in empty streets. "Where's a hero when you need them?" they sigh.

Tonight, they're mostly in Atlas Park, Paragon City's central hub. They've fought demons and psychic clockwork monsters and evil cultists and gods and ghosts and vampires, but they can't fight destiny. As I log in to join the final hours of the best superhero MMO ever made, they stand united with flaming torches and the occasional generic protest sign from the emote bank, collectively staring into the eye of destruction and daring it to blink.

Well, that's the idea. Unfortunately, due to the positioning of a giant statue of modern hero Atlas bent over in front of City Hall by the weight of the world on his shoulders, in practice everyone here is spending their last few hours staring deep into a giant stone anus.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1533147Tue, 04 Dec 2012 12:00:00 +0000Waiting for the end of the world: City of Heroes retrospective

City of Heroes wasn't even close to the first MMORPG I ever played, but it was the first that understood that even Level 1 can feel awesome. It didn't simply let you play as a superhero. It let you feel like a superhero, hurling fire, swinging swords, controlling the minds of lesser men and more. Best of all, with a character creation system no MMORPG has ever beaten, it was your superhero. Other people might have the same powers. None would be quite like you.

Unless you'd just copied Batman, obviously. Then all bets were off.

Sadly, all things come to an end. This Friday, night falls on the City of Heroes for the last time. The servers are being switched off. Never again will Frostfire glance out of his base and shake his head at the sight of heroes skiing around on his ice-ramps instead of coming to fight him. No more will Perez Park confuse the hell out of newcomers, or anything secretly turn out to be a Nemesis plot.

The no-gear-grind philosophy of Guild Wars 2 has been called into question, so developer ArenaNet has responded on Reddit.

Brief recap: a brand new Ascended armour type statistically more powerful than other end-game armours has been added to the game. ArenaNet said hardcore players needed more to do and more progression to chase. But the Guild Wars 2 community interpreted this as signs of an end-game gear grind - a mechanic ArenaNet chastised in the lead up to Guild Wars 2's launch. Did ArenaNet contradict itself?

"I hope we've been clear that GW2 is not a game with virtually no stat progression in it like GW1 was," ArenaNet co-founder and boss Mike O'Brien wrote on Reddit. "That's why GW2 shipped with a higher level cap, and with a hard separation between PVE and PVP.

MMORPGs had a good run. There's no shame in admitting their time in the sun is over, and that it's time to package the whole genre into a small cardboard box, label it 'Fond Memories', and slide it under the bed with classic adventures and those little dancing flower things that seemed like magic back in the '80s.

Obviously, yes, plenty of MMORPGs are doing just fine right now. World of Warcraft boasts over 10 million players, and at least a few of them aren't just there because they can't be bothered to cancel. Guild Wars 2, Eve Online and several of the games that have just turned F2P are doing fine, and would be crazy to shut themselves down just to help me make my point. It would be nice though, if any of them are listening. Blizzard? Hello?

That's not the issue though. People still make adventure games, and do well from them. That doesn't mean it's still a top-tier genre, and largely for the same reason - people still play them, but the numbers failed to scale along with the industry. Once upon a time, MMORPG numbers were the gold standard for online user-bases, when a million was an impossible number that AAA games dreamed of hitting over time.

EA wants its peers to be Apple, Google and Facebook, not publishing rivals Take-Two, Activision and Ubisoft.

The Battlefield and FIFA maker is transitioning into a games as a service business, and as a result sees itself moving away from traditional publishing towards a digital direct to consumer model - with customer service the focal point.

"We think of ourselves less as a peer to our good friends at Take-Two, Activision and Ubisoft and more as a peer, quite frankly, to the service companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon," EA COO Peter Moore told Eurogamer.

Eurogamer.net Podcast host Tom Champion has been ill! He's been as sick as a dog. A rescue dog. A rescue dog with fleas, and with arthritis in its back legs. Poor mutt. But he's back now, and so is the podcast.

Only, well, I wish he'd done some preparation. Instead, in he wafted with no bloody idea what was going on. The real patients (test subjects, even) were to be Tom Bramwell and me, Robert Purchese, his guests.

But it was calamity averted when Champion looked for a champion among you, our listener(s). In a moment of delirious ingenuity he gathered your questions, thousands of them (well, a couple of dozen), cobbled them together and fired them pow-pow-pow at our faces.

It's not subscription MMOs that are dying, Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online maker Turbine told Eurogamer - it's antiquated games that insist upon a single method of payment.

"People now in the West expect to have full control over their entertainment dollar and spend it the way they want to," explained Adam Mersky, Warner's (Turbine's owner) digital communications Witch King.

"It's probably not right to say the subscription MMO is dying, it's probably more right to say the idea of forcing a player to only have one option for having to consume your content - that's probably dying."